Federal government agencies face all kinds of challenges when leveraging IT to drive mission success. From legacy systems that consume a disproportionate amount of the operating budget to architecture that can no longer adapt to modern requirements, these types of obstacles quickly undermine efficiency, performance, and success. One of the most often cited, yet easiest, way to overcome challenges is integration. By keeping six key integration trends in mind, you can plan to poise your agency for long-term mission success.

One of the most frequent topics of conversation among government IT leaders today is how to manage legacy systems at a time when the pressure to modernize is at an all time high but budgets remain tight. But what exactly is a legacy system, and why are they creating such problems in the federal government?

Despite the loss of billions of dollars of funding for IT modernization in the 2017 federal budget, agencies are making investments in their futures. Whether driven by a mandate to serve citizens better or to comply with regulations handed down from Congress, CIOs like LaVerne Council and Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante are determined to bring their agencies and systems into the digital age.

Read on to find out where 18F, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the United States Postal Services (USPS), and the Copyright Office are making strategic investments.

When President Obama’s 2017 budget was released in early February, it was clear that a key focus of the administration’s final year was to drive a smarter and more efficient government through IT. Key sections of the budget confirmed what has been evident for some time now: that “[t]he Administration has embarked on a comprehensive effort to fundamentally improve the way that the Government delivers technology services to the public,” through means of “recruiting top technologists and entrepreneurs to work within agencies on the highest priority projects, leveraging the best processes to increase oversight and accountability for IT spending, and ramping up Government contracting with innovative companies.”

Open Data is the concept that data should be available for use and distribution by anyone. In many cases an open data model enables speed and flexibility within the devops community. That speed is then passed along to other organizational areas, allowing government IT to move at the speed required by today’s business world. However, choosing to embrace open data and the choice it offers can be perplexing. Incorporating an API Management system to manage, protect and monitor data exchange is the best path for agency IT leaders to embark on in order to alleviate concerns over open data.

Government CIOs are under a tremendous amount of pressure to address the issue of aging IT infrastructure and the impediments it introduces to meeting the mission. Between choosing whether to continue to upgrade legacy systems or to invest in new infrastructure, the pressure is on to make decisions that are timely, budget-friendly, and that will also ensure mission success.

Avi Bender, Chief Technology Officer at the Census Bureau, is on the leading edge of a monumental revolution in the federal government. He’s already a pioneer in digital government, but with the 2020 Census just around the corner, he’s looking to invest in an infrastructure that will not only support the processing and analysis of data, but enable it to become a jewel in the crown of the federal government’s open data mandate. In fact, The Census Bureau’s Lisa Blumerman, said recently that “[we]’re bringing the decennial census into the 21st century…This census is going to be like no other census.”

At the beginning of each year there are a good many quips about how the future is finally here. Yet, despite the fact that it is 2016, most government agencies still have a fair ways to go when it comes to modernizing their IT systems so that they can deliver more services to more citizens more quickly. Chris Steel, Chief Solutions Architect at Software AG Government Solutions, shared in a recent article in NextGov that he is confident that many government agencies will focus “on finding the necessary IT capabilities for ‘faster’ transformation [this year] as they realize their existing IT models are not capable of fully supporting their mission.”

IT systems always seem to get more unwieldly and complex the longer they’re in use, leaving government CIOs hampered in their drive to support the mission. These growing complexities result in the ever mounting need for swift application development within government IT.